Today, the majority of trades on Wall Street happen using artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, at least one major financial services company has also used AI to automate low-level legal work, freeing up expensive lawyers to perform higher-value transactions.
Health care is following suit, as some X-ray and other medical data analysis is already being performed by AI systems.
It’s happening in marketing too—according to a Salesforce study, by the end of 2017, 57 percent of marketers had already implemented some form of AI. So if you haven’t at least experimented with some of the new methods, you’re already behind the curve.
But maybe you’re at a loss as to where to begin when it comes to content marketing. You’re thinking, “Even though robots have been used to write simple news articles and to help with customer service, my team does creative work. Robots aren’t yet sophisticated enough to help with that.” But here are a few low-cost ideas to help you get started.
Your best writer can pen the world's most fascinating blog post about how to make funny cat videos, but it doesn't matter if that’s a topic your audience doesn't care about. How do you find out which blog and video topics will be both important and popular in the industry you market for?
Many of the AI tools to do this are out there and free of charge. For example, Crayon uses AI to give you competitor intelligence by analyzing more than 100 different types of data online from 7 million sources. It tracks changes to your competitors’ websites over time and uses AI to display the results.
You can then use these insights to inform your own blogging by determining what topics matter most to your audience and where gaps exist in your content.
HubSpot's Content Strategy tool can also help generate new blog ideas. The Content Strategy tool uses AI to help marketers generate ideas for topic clusters and can then decide which opportunities are worth writing about.
How often are your existing readers taking the time to explore multiple blogs per session? Are you offering them fresh content before they leave your site?
Personalization is a way to engage readers and keep them coming back for more—and AI can be used to do it.
An AI tool called Uberflip can make it easier by cataloging the topics you've already written about and then recommending new content to visitors based on what they've already read on your site. It's an automated way to encourage every reader to stay on-site longer and read more.
Aside from creating great content, how do you find more readers? One way is by going to them (online). A tool called Pathmatics can be your compass by using AI to reveal digital advertising information for hundreds of brands you might not have known about.
You can see not only how much a brand has spent on ads and what ads it runs, but even where the brand advertises. This information can reveal where your target audiences spend time online.
For example, once you know where your competitors advertise most, you can start pitching guest posts to those publications.
That’s right, you can even get a robot to improve your writing. Grammarly is a tool that uses AI to recommend better writing by alerting you to the grammar mistakes you've made and suggesting ways to fix them. It’s also smart enough to give you recommendations to improve your tone and style.
And if you're looking to scale your blogging, Acrolinx is a tool worth trying. Its AI reads and analyzes your content and then uses that data to make sure all your writers follow brand standards and guidelines. No matter how many writers you have—both in-house and freelance—they'll stay on the same page by using this tool. That frees up the time you spend formatting and editing for consistency for writing more articles.
Another tool for scaling your blog is BrightEdge. its suite of AI products make content production easier. It automates production tasks like adding header tags, cross-linking and optimization while also alerting you to which new types of content may perform well for your brand. It can also recommend ways to rank your content and keep readers engaged.
Once you’ve attracted all those new leads to your blog, can AI help with nurturing them? Chatbots have already made a big impact on marketing in a customer support capacity, but some are seeing much more potential in these self-learning machines. Chatbots can recommend new offers and products based on the customer’s purchase history. More and more sophisticated algorithms that can do this are making websites feel as if they’re designed exactly for the particular user in question.
For HubSpot users, it’s easy to create, automate and even scale chatbots to the needs of a particular account. And because the chatbot builder is seamlessly integrated with HubSpot's free CRM, the bots you make can deliver friendlier, more personalized messages based on information you already know about a contact. So instead of your sales team spending time on the early phases of lead nurturing, they can step in when those leads have already had some interaction with the bots.
AI can be used to help your readers move through your sales funnel. Platforms like Terminus help you target your best-fit accounts. Using a conversational marketing platform like Drift can then helps your sales team get necessary background information on prospects and focus on leads that are ready to buy.
So even in a creative field like marketing, you can lean on a robotic helper from time to time for certain tasks. If nothing else, these assistants can free you up to spend time unleashing more of your creativity and closing new deals.
